What is Twitter and why does it keep following me around?

Twitter Explained

Twitter is a social networking and microblogging
service that allows you answer the question, "What are you doing?" by
sending short text messages 140 characters in length, called "tweets",
to your friends, or "followers."

The short format of the tweet is a defining characteristic of the service,
allowing informal collaboration and quick information sharing that provides
relief from rising email and IM fatigue. Twittering is also a less gated
method of communication: you can share information with people that you wouldn't
normally exchange email or IM messages with, opening up your circle of contacts
to an ever-growing community of like-minded people.

You can send your messages using the Twitter website directly, as a single
SMS alert, or via a third-party application such as Twirl, Snitter, or the
Twitterfox add-on for Firefox. (See below for links to Twitter
tools and applications.)

Your tweets are displayed on your profile page, on the home page of each
of your followers, and in the Twitter
public timeline (unless you disable this in your account settings.)

You can receive tweets by visiting the Twitter website, IM, SMS, RSS, email
or via a third-party application.

Why Twitter is Useful

Twitter has many uses for both personal and business use. It's a great way
to keep in touch with your friends and quickly broadcast information about
where you are and what you're up to. For example, "I'm
downtown and aching for some sushi. Anyone like to join me?"

For business, Twitter can be used to broadcast your company's latest news
and blog posts, interact with your customers, or to enable easy internal
collaboration and group communication.

Sending Messages

From your Twitter page: S imply enter a message in the
text field at the top of the page and click "Update."

From your mobile phone: Send an SMS message to 40404.

From your IM account: Send a message to either twitter@twitter.com (Jabber/GTalk) or TwitterIM (AOL).

Your tweet will be displayed to your followers, either on their Twitter
page, mobile phone, or any other way they are setup to receive Twitter updates.

Following Other Twitter Users

Finding and adding friends to your "Twitterverse" is easy.

From the Twitter website: Login to your account, visit
your friends' Twitter pages and click "Follow" underneath their
photo. If your friend's account is public, you will immediately start seeing
their tweets on your page, otherwise your friend will need to approve you
before you can see their updates.

@Replies and Direct Messages

When you send a message with @username at the
beginning, it's understood that your message is intended for that specific
user, but all your followers
can still see the tweet. Note that for the intended recipient to see your
message on their home page, they must be following you, otherwise they will
only see your message on the Replies tab.

To send a friend a private tweet, use the Direct command: d
username message.

When learning about Twitter marketing and trying to figure out what to post to increase success, you end up focusing on your Twitter audience. The problem is that in many cases the audience you get is not actually the one you want to get. This happens because of not properly understanding many important facts about that audience. Believe it or not, it is really simple to misjudge your audience and end up with information that would not be useful in increasing the account’s popularity or engagement.

Many mistakes can be made but here are some that are often seen, especially with inexperienced marketers. Always avoid these mistakes.

Making Assumptions Based On Personal Beliefs

You want to be sure your conclusion is correct. Unfortunately, many people think they know what someone thinks. Since nobody knows what you think right now except you, it is obvious that this is a really bad mistake.

For instance, let us say that you want to sell porcelain dental veneers and you think that all women over 30 will want to get this procedure done when necessary because of the importance of appearance. That will be the truth for many of the women but not for all. By trying to acknowledge a part of your desired Twitter audience you can easily end up turning off another part. That is not your goal because you really want to engage your entire possible audience.

Twitter audience

Not Using Analytics Tools

It is definitely interesting to notice how many Twitter marketers do not want to use some of the tools that are available for them right now and that would help work a lot easier. When you do not look at analytics data and you do not use as many tools as you can find, it is a certainty that problems are going to appear since you will surely miss out on a lot of data that would be really useful for you identifying your audience’s needs.

Lack Of Interaction

You cannot build anything on Twitter if you just post and you use some hashtags. A big problem is the lack of interaction that is often seen with business accounts. Always look at the influencers that do interact and get into a conversation with them. Some of the best interactions on Twitter are based on conversations. You simply cannot be successful on Twitter without interacting with followers and with those that you want to have as your followers.

Remember it is really important that you to know all you can about the Twitter audience that will help you to reach your current goals. However, this is not as simple as you may think. Since you are currently investing a lot of money in your business and you want to be sure that online marketing is done in a proper way, focus on all the data you can obtain, no matter how you get it.

The power of Twitter for businesses has grown immensely over the past few years. Newsworthy content for businesses can no longer get significant coverage from issuing a press release to traditional media sources, alone. Sharing your press release on Twitter allows your message to reach a more targeted, relevant audience, for FREE.

Sounds great, right? What’s the catch?

Twitter has a rapid moving news feed, so tweets have a tendency to get buried if they don’t stand out. Also, a single tweet is limited to 140 characters, so the likelihood of grabbing the attention of your readers is determined by how eye-catching your 140 characters, or essentially one line of copy, is to your prospective audience.

How to make sure your press release gets noticed

First, make sure your company has a solid presence on Twitter. Make sure you are satisfied with your network of followers and your brand is well established, meaning you are actively tweeting multiple times daily and interacting with your followers. If your brand isn’t as established on Twitter as you would like, blogs such as Social Media Examiner, HubSpot, and Hootsuite, are some of the leading references for businesses looking to improve social media engagement and brand recognition.

Secondly, it’s important that you’re tracking the attention your press release gets. If you have a platform that is set up to track how many clicks from Twitter to your release you’re getting, such as HubSpot, Hootsuite, Twitter Analytics, or Google Analytics, that’s great. If you do not have a tracking tool, it doesn’t mean you can’t leverage your release the same way, you just won’t receive exact data, click-rate, etc.

The tweet itself

Out of the average 400-500 words in a press release, the headline is absolutely the most important. It’s suggested to keep your headline within 100 characters, so it’ll be the bulk of your tweet. The remainder of your tweet should include hashtags.

Hashtags are the words or phrases that follow the # sign in a tweet. Hashtags are designed to track trending topics and organize subject matter. For example, if you were to type in #SuperBowl during the playoffs in Twitter’s search bar, everyone who tweeted using #SuperBowl will appear on your news feed, regardless of if you follow them. The reason this feature is good for business is, a hashtag allows your tweet the potential to reach more than just your own followers, increasing its visibility. To make sure you’re using hashtags properly, research what your partners and competitors are using on their accounts.

What to do

Use conversational language. Your followers want to know there’s a real person behind your tweet and a good test is, if it doesn’t intrigue you, it’s not going to intrigue them.

Use hashtags, but do not, I repeat, do not overuse or misuse a hashtag. Doing so will make you look amateur and using too many hashtags can water down the importance of your message.

Attaching an image to your tweet can be helpful in grabbing your audience’s attention, however don’t force it. If your logo or another applicable image does not apply, don’t use it.

What NOT to do

You will more than likely be tempted to tweet your release multiple times because of how fast it disappears on your news feed. Reminding your audience about your release is okay, as long as you reword it and tweet it at a different time, preventing your followers from thinking it is spam.

Don’t write a misleading headline in an attempt to get more clicks from your followers. They will quickly realize and you’ll leave a bad taste in their mouths.

When it comes to any marketing or public relations messaging, a company has to choose what their business goals are, establish measurable objectives, declare who their target audience is, and choose the tactics the company plans to use in order to get their message across as efficiently and successfully as possible.

If your company does not currently have a Twitter account, or the account has little to no followers at this time, some press release distribution services will tweet your release for you, using their own Twitter account. For example, www.prnewswire.com and www.PRunderground.com are two distributions that offer a social add-on option.

Twitter CEO, Dick Costolo, wants to make twitter more seamless to switch between public and private messaging.

Currently, the switch isn’t easy.

They are experimenting with ways to highlight tweets that are most relevant to you when you visit the service. There are three ways that could be done:

completely automated algorithms

human curation

a combination of human curation and automated algorithms

The first would be nirvana, but like some of google’s search automation, or some of the terrible article spinners that lazy marketers use, 100% automation would probably be an awful result. The second would be great for employment, but too expensive and very bad for the company’s bottom line. So a combination of automation and human editing or curation could do the trick. Facebook is already going down the combination path and it seems to be working.

Whether you are a real person, a business or a brand, and earlier this month, you got a makeover. The first time you saw it, you might have thought there was something wrong with your browser. Something looked different, and you might have wondered if your computer had been hacked or maybe your browser was on the blink.

There were three changes to tweets:

Best Tweets: Tweets that receive more engagement appear slightly larger

Pinned Tweet: You can pin a Tweet to the top of your page

Filtered Tweets: You can choose which timeline to view when reviewing other profiles

The pinned tweet is a nice idea, because it gives you a way to highlight a specific tweet, that isn’t pushed down by your less important tweets. I’ve always tried to handle this by choosing the order that I tweet at a particular time, but that only lasts as long as you can hold of saying something new.

Filtered tweets are good too, because you can set whether you look at tweets, tweets with photos or videos or tweets and replies. I like this.

Best tweets might have to grow on me over time. Increasing the size of the font for tweets with added engagement is a reasonable idea, but I’m not sure I like it yet. And what happens to a tweet that goes viral and gets massive engagement? Does it take over the whole screen?

The other things that changed are that the new web profile allows for a larger profile photo, and a customized header. Nice changes.

If you want to discover the current trends on Twitter, and the reason they are trending, What the Trend tells you what and why.

Two types of messages drive What The Trend – short phrases and hashtags.

The site gets its trending information using the twitter API, then What The Trend members pitch in, to say why they think the items are interesting, providing a short description of it. Then, What The Trend staff moderate the descriptions and send them back out in their own feed. That feed runs on many other sites, including Twitter.

Tweeternet will keep an eye on it and it we think it is valuable, we may decide to run it at Tweeternet too.